Employee benefits: Beyond the fringe?;

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EMPLOYEE BENEFITS:
Beyond the Fringe?
By RAYMOND B. KRIEGER Consulting Actuary, Touche Ross-Stennes
An employee of a department store in the southwest was recently in an automobile accident that will put him out of commission for a year. The man had worked 20 years for this employer, and so the store decided to continue his pay on an unofficial basis and publicized this fact to its em-ployees for morale purposes.
But another store in the same area felt that a better way to improve company morale was to take out a group long-term disability policy to pay a portion of any employee's salary during a long period of disablement. The existence of a third party (i.e. the insurance company) to handle such payments would give its employees more security, it fell, because disability payments would no longer depend sim-ply on the good will of the company.
it is obvious which store has a more appealing benefit program.
Today's retailers are concerned about recruiting and re-taining quality people. But how often do they consider the importance of a good employee benefit program? Retailers would be well advised to review their present benefit pro-grams to see if they are solving their problems and if they are not, whether their benefit programs should be revised or replaced by new ones. In doing so, they should be aware of the wide range of existing benefits as well as what future employee benefits are being considered.
The type of benefit program a store has should be in-fluenced by the unique characteristics of the average store's personnel:
— Relatively high average age.
— A proportion which is 70 percent female.
— An average of 40 percent of the employees with less than five years of service. Continued
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